Santa and Marigold

She came to the North Pole to start over. She never expected to rewrite Christmas.

Two years after losing her husband, Marigold Hartwell is still learning the secret Rory never got to tell her: he was a reindeer shifter. When their daughter Junie shifts for the first time, Marigold trades her Edinburgh flat for a small apartment above a village bakery, under a sky lit by the aurora, so Junie can train at North Pole Academy.

Marigold takes a logistics job at Santa's Operations Centre and spends her first three weeks buried in delivery routes. Then she finds a flaw that forty years of experts missed.

Someone notices. Santa himself: silver-haired, sharp-eyed, ancient, and nothing like the legend.

Their partnership over an enchanted planning wall leads into a sealed archive and a decision made in 1703. A lost delivery corridor. Forty-three communities whose Christmas morning has never truly turned. And a failsafe written into the northern lights that could turn the world's hope into its opposite if anyone opens the corridor the wrong way.

With Christmas Eve closing in, Marigold has to decide how much she's willing to risk for the work, for her daughter's first great discovery, and for the man who keeps walking past her lit window at night.

Santa and Marigold is a clean, slow-burn, later-in-life holiday romance set in the world of North Pole University. It can be read as a standalone.

Perfect for readers who love:

•Second chances at love after loss
•Slow-burn romance between two brilliant, guarded people
•A single mom with a fierce, clever daughter
•Cozy magic, secret archives, and ancient mysteries
•Sweet romance with no spice and no profanity